We investigate the relation between general affective meaning and the use of particular phonological segments in poems, presenting a novel quantitative measure to assess the basic affective tone of a text based on foregrounded phonological units and their iconic affective properties. The novel method is applied to the volume of German poems "verteidigung der wölfe" (defense of the wolves) by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who categorized these 57 poems as friendly, sad, or spiteful. Our approach examines the relation between the phonological inventory of the texts to both the author's affective categorization and readers' perception of the poems-assessed by a survey study. Categorical comparisons of basic affective tone reveal significant differences between the 3 groups of poems in accordance with the labels given by the author as well as with the affective rating scores given by readers. Using multiple regression, we show our sublexical measures of basic affective tone to account for a considerable part of variance (9.5%Ϫ20%) of ratings on different emotion scales. We interpret this finding as evidence that the iconic properties of foregrounded phonological units contribute significantly to the poems' emotional perception-potentially reflecting an intentional use of phonology by the author. Our approach represents a first independent statistical quantification of the basic affective tone of texts.

The literary genre of poetry is inherently related to the expression and elicitation of emotion via both content and form. To explore the nature of this affective impact at an extremely basic textual level, we collected ratings on eight different general affective meaning scales—valence, arousal, friendliness, sadness, spitefulness, poeticity, onomatopoeia, and liking—for 57 German poems (“die verteidigung der wölfe”) which the contemporary author H. M. Enzensberger had labeled as either “friendly,” “sad,” or “spiteful.” Following Jakobson's (1960) view on the vivid interplay of hierarchical text levels, we used multiple regression analyses to explore the specific influences of affective features from three different text levels (sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical) on the perceived general affective meaning of the poems using three types of predictors: (1) Lexical predictor variables capturing the mean valence and arousal potential of words; (2) Inter-lexical predictors quantifying peaks, ranges, and dynamic changes within the lexical affective content; (3) Sublexical measures of basic affective tone according to sound-meaning correspondences at the sublexical level (see Aryani et al., 2016). We find the lexical predictors to account for a major amount of up to 50% of the variance in affective ratings. Moreover, inter-lexical and sublexical predictors account for a large portion of additional variance in the perceived general affective meaning. Together, the affective properties of all used textual features account for 43–70% of the variance in the affective ratings and still for 23–48% of the variance in the more abstract aesthetic ratings. In sum, our approach represents a novel method that successfully relates a prominent part of variance in perceived general affective meaning in this corpus of German poems to quantitative estimates of affective properties of textual components at the sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical level.

Artworks with sad and affectively negative content have repeatedly been reported to elicit positive aesthetic appreciation. This topic has received much attention both in the history of poetics and aesthetics as well as in recent studies on sad films and sad music. However, poetry and aesthetic evaluations of joyful and sad poetry have received only little attention in empirical studies to date. We collected beauty and liking ratings for 24 sad and 24 joyful poems from 128 participants. Following previous studies, we computed an integrated measure for overall aesthetic appreciation based on the beauty and liking ratings to test for differences in appreciation between joyful and sad poems. Further, we tested whether readers' judgments are related to their affinity for poetry. Results show that sad poems are rated significantly higher for aesthetic appreciation than joyful poems, and that aesthetic appreciation is influenced by the participants' affinity for poetry.